 Within a few years after their deaths, Antill in 1770, and Lord Sterling in 1783, their prize-winning vineyards were neglected and gone.In the colonial period and early nineteenth-century, the prevailing market in the New Jersey was for Jersey cider and distilled spirits.During the 1840s, in Newark, producers were creating sparkling apple cider and marketing it as "champagne"—so much so that Scottish traveller Alexander Mackay asserted that he learned that most "imported champagne" in America came in fact from Newark.